Candlenight, page 2
Waiting for the kettle to boil, Bethan stood by the window, wondering whether to take up smoking again, and she thought, I hate weekends.
Outside the window it was Saturday night in Pontmeurig. Only eight miles—and yet a whole world—away from the village of Y Groes. Barely four thousand people lived in this town now, but it still had seventeen pubs. Considering how much of the population was either too young, too sick or too ostensibly clean-living to go out for a drink, that left…well, it made Bethan wonder how they'd all survived, the seventeen pubs.
She took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, smudging the remains of her make-up and not caring; she would not be going anywhere tonight.
Just before ten o'clock, Guto Evans phoned.
"What are you doing then, Bethan, at this moment?"
"Nothing illegal," Bethan said cautiously.
"That's a shame," Guto said. He paused, hesitated. "Look, the night, as they say, is young. Why don't we go out and paint the town? Any colour you like, except for grey, which nobody would notice."
Bethan pictured him with the phone tucked into his shaggy beard, like a big terrier with a bone, his stocky frame wedged into a comer of his mother's front parlour amid hundreds of plates and china ornaments.
"I don't think so," Bethan said solemnly into the phone, her glasses slipped and with one finger she pushed them back along her nose. "I have my reputation to protect. You could lead me into bad ways."
"One drink, then? A chat?"
"I'm sorry, Guto, I do appreciate it. It's just . . . well, I've such a lot of work to catch up on."
And she drew him away from the subject by asking if he'd heard about the unfortunate incident at that afternoon's protest demo by some of their mutual friends in the sometimes-militant Welsh Language Society. The society targeted a particular estate agent in Aberystwyth who specialised in selling country' cottages in Welsh-speaking areas to affluent English people looking for holiday homes.
"It got seriously out of hand, of course." Bethan said, some of the boys had collected For Sale signs out of people's gardens and heaped them up outside Hughes's door. And what should someone do but pour paraffin over the pile and set them alight. If the fire brigade had not arrived in time, who knows, the whole building might have gone up."
"Would have been no great loss. Bloody Emyr Hughes. Him and his new Mercedes. And a helicopter now, did you hear?" Guto snorted. "Traitorous fat bastard. Grown fat on English gold."
Bethan smiled. Guto sharpening up his rhetoric, now, because it was rumoured Burnham-Lloyd was a very sick man and there might soon be a by-election. "So Dewi and Alun Phillips were arrested," she said. 'They will probably be charged tomorrow. Wilful damage, I hope. Not arson."
"Of course, I would have been there myself," Guto said. "But I am keeping a low political profile until such time I am called."
"Well, there's sensible." said Bethan, in mock-surprise. She paused, "Um, it was nice of you to ask me out."
"Yes," said Guto. "I am a nice man, this is true."
"But I must get back to my marking."
"Should I call again some time?"
"Yes. When I'm not so busy."
"And when will that be? No, no, it's all right. I might be nice but I'm not daft. Goodnight, Bethan. Nos da."
"Guto, have you ever found . . . ?"
"What?"
She had been going to ask about the cannwyll gorff. She stopped herself. What could she say? Guto, I'm scared. There is something badly wrong in the village and I don't think I can handle it.
"Hello . . . Bethan . . . ?"
But if she said any more then Guto would say it was quite clear that in her state of mind Bethan should not be spending the night alone, and so . . .
"Are you still there, Bethan?"
"Yes ... I ... It doesn't matter," she said. "Nos da, Guto."
"You take care of yourself," he said.
It would have been nice to go out for a drink. And a chat, Just a chat. She wondered: did I say no because it would not be seemly for a widow of less than a year to be seen out with Guto Evans on a Saturday night in Pontmeurig?
No, she decided. If I'd thought that I would have gone.
Saturday night was probably the reason the seventeen pubs survived.
They had come into Pontmeurig now, from all the outlying villages and the hill farms, sometimes six or seven of them in a single Land-Rover. Farmers, farmers' sons, farmers' grandsons. Even a few women, these days. Some of the men would get quietly and expertly drunk. A handful would make a macho celebration out of it, and there would perhaps be a fight, a smashed window, a beer glass flung in the street, splintering against the kerb or somebody's head.
A yellow haze of smoke and steam, beer fumes and chip fat settled on the street below the lighted window of the apartment over Hampton's bookshop. In the window, Bethan was a still silhouette.
She drew the thin curtains, turned back to the sadly over-crowded sitting room, drank tea and glared at the dark green cover of the book lying on the sofa. Sali Dafis. Aged seven.
A bright child. Confident too—winner of the recitation prize for her age-group at this year's Urdd Eisteddfod, where three other children from the school had also won prizes. Which was incredible for a little village school with twenty-four pupils. One of the judges had commented this was clearly a school where children were encouraged to be imaginative. He could say that again. Bethan thought. She remembered Buddug, huge and beaming, in audience. Buddug, quite rightly, taking all the credit because Bethan had been away looking after a sick husband,
Then mourning for a dead husband.
She was back now. She didn't have to return, she'd terminated her lease on the cottage. She could have gone anywhere, stayed in the city, where there was no silence and no sense of a gathering darkness.
Parting the curtains, Bethan looked down into the street, watched four youths standing outside the Drovers' Arms nursing beer glasses, admiring a motor bike. She thought, I should have gone. Maybe it was my last chance. I've been too long with death.
Irritated and restless now, she snatched the green exercise book from the sofa. Sali Dafis was the daughter of the man who ran the garage. Her mother had died when Sali was a baby; the child had been raised by her grandmother, Mrs. Bronwen Dafis. a withered crone who dispensed heart remedies and told fortunes.
And who, Bethan thought, frowning, was also a friend of Buddug's.
She got out her red pen, intending not to mark Sali's exercise but to write, "See me after school" at the bottom it, because the child needed help. She had a vague memory of Sali's mother, a little blonde-haired secretary from Essex whom Dilwyn had met on holiday.
As she started to write "gwel . . at the bottom of the second drawing, Bethan's red ballpoint pen ran out. Without thinking, she bustled into the bedroom to pinch a pen from the inside pocket of Robin's jacket in the wardrobe. Stood there with the wardrobe door half-open, a hand inside feeling from coat to coat. Her coats. Realising then that Robin's jacket had never been in this bedroom, had gone long ago to the Oxfam shop, probably with the pens still in the pocket.
I'm not going to cry, she told herself. I'm going to laugh. But she couldn't make her lips go through the motions.
She heard a scornful, trailing cheer from the street outside, as she went back into the living room, edging around cumbersome furniture she didn't need any more..
A male voice hooted and a girl screamed in excitement as Bethan sat down at the table to continue her note to Sali in pencil.
"Geraint, don't . . . !" the girl squealed in the street and Bethan knew that whatever it was Geraint was doing the girl really didn't mind. It was about romance.
Bethan looked up from the table. By the wan light of the Victorian brass standard lamp, their first Christmas present from Robin's mother in Durham, she saw a little attic flat over somebody else's failed bookshop in a town which had been falling apart for five centuries.
Single person's accommodation, Bethan thought.
She broke down then, a hot rush of despair, over the horror-comic drawings of Sali Dafis, aged seven.
For three nights before Robin died, the village women said, the cannwyll gorff had been seen. First in the churchyard, then over the river.
Finally, hanging solemnly in the still air outside their cottage.
When Bethan raised her head from the table she saw that the pages of the exercise book were crumpled and tear-stained,
I spilled tea on your book, she would tell Sali on Monday, I shall have to give you a new one. I'm sorry. All your nice drawings.
Feeling suddenly light-headed, she almost rang Guto back to say yes, she would go out with him and they would get very, very drunk.
She didn't, though. It was not the time.
Chapter III
Above him the whitewashed ceiling gleamed faintly between beams as thick as railway sleepers. The heavy bed of Victorian mahogany was creaking below like the timbers a sailing ship.
Sinking.
Head rolling back on the pillow, he closed his eyes.
. . . And his mind was alive with images, burgling his brain like fragments of a dream getting through from other side of sleep, as if they couldn't wait. Black tower in a purple sky, perpendicular tower, wooden bell-stage, in tiers . . .
Always ends in tiers, he thought ludicrously. Opening his eyes again, he tried to calm his thoughts, remembering pushing at the door of the inn to escape from the cloying dark. Then the yellow light, beer haze, oak beams, the ceaseless banter—the overwhelming relief of it, of being back amongst these tiresome people with their impenetrable language. Still not closing time when he'd returned. How had he made it back so quickly?
Pounding pain in his chest now. He reached to the bedside cabinet for a Trinitrin. Slipped it under his tongue.
How had he got back? He remembered the stink of decay all around him in the churchyard. Remembered trying to find the steps in the mist. Then nothing until the door and the yellow light. Inside, they had seemed almost pleased to see him.
"All right then, Professor?"
"Well hell, man, you look cold . . ."
"Course he's cold, Morgan. Bloody church—sorry, Reverend—always cold, that church. No heating, see. Get him a drink, for God's sake, Aled."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. Doctor Ingley. Should have replaced these batteries weeks ago, but you know how it is. Look, my fault, have a drink. What is it to be now, nice drop of brandy? Best Welsh brandy, mind…"
"Thank you, no. I think I'll go directly to bed."
"Big mistake, Professor. First time this year Aled's offered anybody a free tot of his precious bloody brandy. Never see it again."
"Leave him be, Morgan. Poor man's knackered."
"Oh aye, leave him be, now, is it Aled? Any excuse, you bugger."
"I'm sorry, I. . . good night."
"Night, Professor."
"Nos da i chi!"
Still the pain.
Another Trinitrin. Worked in seconds, they always worked in seconds. He lay there in the bed, not moving, the pill under his tongue. It was a small room; just beyond the bed was a lumbering Victorian wardrobe, to its right the uncurtained window hanging open for air, bringing in the sounds of glasses jingling as they were collected in the bar below, laughter, oaths, a nos da or two.
He was uncomfortable and tried to roll over. But when he moved the pain ripped through his chest like the roots of a tree being torn out of the ground,
Christ.
Breathe. Come on, breathe steadily.
His eyes closed by themselves.
Creaking of the bed. Wooden bed. Wooden bellstage, moulded doorway eighteenth-century, heptagonal font, perpendicular tower . . . black on purple . . . falling . . .
God in heaven, I don't know where I am . . .
Blindfold we could find our way . . .
Calm down. It wasn't a candle,
candle, andle, ndle . . .
Sharp, probing pain now, deep in his chest, like a slender knife going in . . .
. . . and his eyes came open, to show him there was a candle. At the bottom of the bed. Just above his feet. The flame did not waver.
He shut out the image in frozen panic. It was only a symbol, a motif summoned by his subconscious, an hallucination, a manifestation of the corruption in his system - a sick body's attempt to bring down the mind to its own level of decay.
Dying people, he thought in silent hysteria, conjured up choirs of angels, all that nonsense. Chemicals. And his own chemicals now, flooding about uncontrollably, mixing the toxic cocktails, how ironic they should throw off such an image. The corpse candle. Harbinger of death. Flickering from the periphery of his scholarly probings into a society still obsessed with its own mythology.
He could make this candle go away. He could send it back to his subconscious. He was furious now. He would not submit to this invasion. And he would not die. Damned if he would.
Damned if he . . .
Ingley squeezed his eyes shut, trying to squeeze rationality into his thoughts . . . and found himself walking up the aisle of the church, footsteps on stone, tock, tock, tock . . .
Turn back, turn back, turn back . . . !
tock, tock, tock . . .
Can't . . . Can't go on . . . Must go back . . .
Drawn steadily down the aisle towards the steep window leaking livid light into the nave.
He struggled frantically to open his eyes, didn't care now what arcane symbol they would show him, so long as it could pull him out of this place of old, forgotten, stinking evil. He felt himself rolling about in the bed, sweating cold fluid, screaming inside. But his eyelids, fastened down like heavy blinds, would not move. He remembered as a boy being shut by older boys inside a wall cupboard where there was barely room to breathe and heaving at the door in helpless panic, his first experience of claustrophobia, the stifling terror.
tock . . . tock . . .
Please. Let me go. I'm sorry, oh God, I'm sorry.
It was cold in the church. The altar cloth was white, with a mulberry splash, like an old bloodstain, where it caught light through the long windows. The altar was where you turned left, three paces to . . .
No . . . !"
Three paces.
tock . . .
The air thickened and vibrated with a frigid energy.
tock . . .
No. Please . . . Can't . . . Jesus Christ, let me out!
tock
A long black shadow arose in his path. He screamed. Screamed to get out of the church. Screamed for his eyes to open. But it was as if, while his mind was elsewhere, both lids had been very precisely stitched up.
. . . but the stone eyelids of the knight sprang open, and his eyes were of cold amethyst light. His hands unclasped from prayer, chipped knuckles, white bone beneath the stone, seeking one's throat. His stone mouth splintered into a grin.
Thomas Ingley threw all that remained of his strength into the fight to re-enter his bedroom at the inn, like pushing and pushing at a seized-up manhole cover to escape from the fetid cellar, the strain tearing at his poor exhausted heart, stretching and popping like rotted rubber.
Don't want to know who you are. Don't care anymore who you are! But please . . . don't let it happen here, to be held forever among the deep shadows and the misty mauveness. . .
The stone hands locked around his windpipe. His eyeballs bulged.
And his eyes opened.
Lids flicking up with a butterfly motion. Effortless.
The room was quiet and the air was still. He could see the wardrobe in the corner by the door. The moon through the uncurtained window. The luminous green hands of the travel alarm clock, although he couldn't make out how they were arranged.
Inside his chest he felt nothing at all. The bed was silent now, no creaks. He expected to find the bedclothes in knots, but the sheets were still stiffly tucked in around him. Hospital corners. He lay calmly motionless and listened to his breathing, steady now. Nor could he feel his heart pounding any more.
So peaceful.
The relief was so great that he didn't try to move, just let his head sink into the pillow and his gaze drift up to the ceiling, where the little light hung in a frosty miasma about six inches above his left temple. He went on watching the light, fully resigned now, as it turned from blue to pink . . . to blood red.
He tried to scream then, his face twisting, but it came out as a parched rattle.
Chapter IV
This was the thing about Wales. Some places seemed cursed—filthy weather, soil you could hardly grow dandelions in—and some places, like this village, had it all. The change, when you came out of the forestry, the other side of the Nearly Mountains, was dramatic and yet subtle too . . . the landscape greener, the weather milder, the whole atmosphere all-round mellower.
It embraced you, he thought, like a good woman,
The better to appreciate it, Dai Death, the undertaker in Pontmeurig, stopped his hearse in the middle of the road, where it left the forestry, and looked down on the village in its little cwm. Sunday afternoon. No hurry. It had looked like rain in Pontmeurig- but the sky over Y Groes was as deep a blue as you could ever expect to see in Wales.
The cottages were a clutch of eggs in a nest; the church a benevolent old bird.
A clutch of eggs, yes. Nice metaphor. Dai liked to write a bit of poetry and aspired to the crown of the Glanmeurig Eisteddfod. Sitting at the wheel of his hearse, window wound down and the sunlight warm on his bald head, he lit a cigarette, feeling happy because he liked doing business in Y Groes and it wasn't often he got the chance—not because nobody died here, but because they had little use for undertakers. He wondered, not for the first time, how anyone could look out at such a place from his deathbed and hold on to any hopes of going to a greater paradise,
By all accounts, though, today's customer had been in no position to dwell upon the relative merits of a hypothetical heaven and the village of Y Groes. He'd gone in the night when, Dai supposed, Y Groes looked much the same as any other village.
